7th-10th April: I will be presenting the Hearing Body project at BNA 2013 Festival of Neuroscience, taking place at Barbican London. We will be demonstrating body illusions at the Barbican Foyers as part of the Wonder: Street Fair. Everybody is welcome to come and experience them!

The Hearing Body project is a project leaded by Dr Ana Tajadura-Jimenez and funded by an ESRC Future Research Leader Fellowship. In this project I am investigating how auditory information generated by our bodies updates body-representation. This mental representation wehave of our bodies is essential for successful interaction with the environment. The representation is not fixed, but is continuously updated in response to the available sensory information. While previous studies have highlighted the role of vision, touch and proprioception in constructing the body-representation in the brain, the role of auditory information remains largely unknown. Interestingly, the sounds that accompany almost every bodily movement are highly rich in information about the body and the space immediately surrounding it. For instance, the sounds produced when tapping on a surface inform us about the length and strength of our arm.

A series of psychological experiments are being carried out in order to explore how altering self-produced sounds in real-time changes different body-representations, including the representation of the space surrounding the body, the potential actions that we can perform and the emotional states linked to our body capabilities. This multidisciplinary and innovative research project will provide novel insights into the nature of body-representations and, ultimately, guide the design of audio-based applications that can improve body-image, self-esteem, movement patterns and social interactions to support well-being and rehabilitation for people with movement impairments.